A colleague of mine contacted me during the week to ask how one could
determine if a POWER7 system was capable of Active Memory Expansion. I thought
I'd share my response with everyone who follows my blog.

You can check if the system is capable of providing Active Memory
Expansion (AME), from the HMC command line using the lssyscfg command, as shown here:hscroot@hmc1:~>
lssyscfg -r sys -m Server-8233-E8B-SN1000 -F active_mem_expansion_capable1

Alternatively you can view the capabilities of
the managed system from the HMC GUI, under System properties/Capabilities, as
shown in the following image.

Once you’ve concluded that your POWER7 system is
AME capable, the next step is to check if AME is enabled or disabled for
an LPAR. This is easily done from the AIX command line with the lparstat and/or amepat commands, as shown in the following example:;Running
lparstat and amepat on a LPAR with AME
disabled.

Note
that I deliberately ran these commands as a non-root user to highlight the fact
that you don’t need root access to ascertain whether or not AME is active on an
LPAR.

By the
way, did you know that AME is now supported in SAP production environments running
on AIX and POWER7? Both SAP application servers, as well as database servers
running DB2 LUW are supported. Unfortunately there’s no support for LPARs with
Oracle RDBMS at this stage. Thanks to George Manousos from IBM Australia for
providing me with this update.

As AME is not
recommended with large page support, AME
will disable AIX

64KB pages by default.

AME monitoring
capability in CCMS

Monitoring
capabilities are available with saposcol v12.46 for more details see SAP note
710975.

It looks as
though SAP have been quick to support AME on AIX/POWER7. This is a great
benefit to SAP customers running with PowerVM on the IBM POWER platform. The
following screenshot shows the SAP CCMS with AME statistics being reported.

The SAP AIX porting team continues
in further improving the integration of PowerVM into SAP system monitoring. While
in the past already most processor and AIX virtualization metrics could be
monitored via CCMS, now POWER7 Active Memory Expansion (AME) has been
included. Customers will find a new memory section in the respective
CCMS-panel as depicted in this screen shot.

For those
who are not familiar with what AME actually is and how it can benefit you, I
suggest you take a look at the IBM AME Wiki site first:

I was
collecting a list of WWPNs for a bunch of new AIX LPARs I was installing from
scratch. There were two ways I could find the WWPN for a virtual Fibre Channel
adapter on a new LPAR i.e. one that did not yet have an operating system
installed.

I started by
checking the LPAR properties from the HMC (as shown below).

To speed
things up I moved to the HMC command line tool, lssyscfg, to display the
WWPNs (as shown below).

I gave these
WWPNS to my SAN administrator so that he could manually “zone in” the LPARs on
the SAN switches and allocate storage to each. He then, half-jokingly said,
“Gee, it would be nice if you could insert the colons into the WWPNS for me! J”. Of course, this got me thinking and
after a few minutes of playing with sed, I came up with a way to do this
quickly.

# cat lpar1_wwpns.txt | sed
's/../&:/g;s/:$//'

c0:50:76:03:a2:92:00:7c

c0:50:76:03:a2:92:00:7e

c0:50:76:03:a2:92:00:78

c0:50:76:03:a2:92:00:7a

Now my list
of WWPNs was ready to be cut’n’paste by my SAN admin. He was happy.

Here are some questions I received recently regarding VLAN
tagging on the VIO server. My answers are shown in green.

“Hi Chris,

Q: I’m trying to
understand when, where and why there would be the need to use ‘mkvdev –vlan
(etc.) on the VIOS, and I’m wondering whether you would be able to clarify this
for me, please.

Is it necessary to add
the VLAN tag devices to the SEA, or is it suffice to just have them defined
within the Virtual Ethernet itself which is part of the SEA?”

A:
It is suffice to simply define the VLAN ids assigned to the Virtual Ethernet
adapters associated with the SEA.

“Q: For completeness,
on the rare occasions I have done this, I have added the VLAN’s to the Virtual
Ethernet and also as VLAN devices on the VIOS (mkvdev –vlan etc.)”

A:
mkvdev –vlan is not necessary, unless
the VIOS needs to communicate with hosts on different VLANs i.e. you need an IP
address on the VIOS for each VLAN. This does not mean the SEA will bridge this
VLAN traffic for VIOCs.

“Q: The reason I
started thinking of this is, is because one of our customers wants to add new
VLAN’s to their SEA, but they’re not running Power7 hardware. Therefore, the
online method would be to add a new Virtual Adapter which contains the new VLAN
ID’s to the VIOS using DLPAR, then use chdev –dev (etc.) on the SEA to include
the new Virtual Ethernet.”

A:
Agreed. The “IBM PowerVM Virtualization Managing and Monitoring” Redbook
states: “If your system doesn’t support dynamic VLAN modifications and you are
modifying the VLAN list of a virtual Ethernet adapter that is configured in a
SEA with ha_mode enabled, the HMC will not allow you to reconfigure the list of
VLANs on that interface. You will need to add an additional virtual Ethernet
adapter and modify the virt_adapters list of the SEA, or modify the profile of
both Virtual I/O Servers and re-activate both Virtual I/O Servers at the same
time.”

“Q: From the phone
call I had, it would appear that the VLAN tags are included on the Virtual
Ethernet device, but have not been added to the SEA by running mkvdev –vlan
(etc. ) on the VIOS’s. This leads me to assume that the ‘mkvdev –vlan’ is
only required if there is a requirement to access the VIOS itself from a
particular VLAN. Am I right, or is there something I’m not understanding?
I’m unable to find documentation that explains the answer. Do you happen to
know?”

A:
That is also my understanding (based on my experience). On page 483 of the “IBM
PowerVM Virtualization Introduction and Configuration” Redbook , it states:
“The addition of VLAN interfaces to the SEA adapter is only necessary if the VIO
Server itself needs to communicate on these VLANs”.

“Q: Hi Chris,

We are trying to
associate a new entX Virtual Ethernet Trunk Device to an existing SEA. The new
device must be configured for VLAN tagging. The existing virtual Ethernet
adapter that (is already associated with the SEA) is not configured for VLAN
tagging. This device will remain associated to the SEA and continue to pass
untagged packets to the already configured network.

Ultimately the configuration
we want would be two entX devices associated with the existing SEA. One entX
device is configured for notagged packets and the other entX device is
configured for tagging.

Reply: “hmm ok I see
what you are saying, I will give it a go and tell you how it turns out...thanks.
ok finally got around to testing using a VIOS at DR site. Created
new virtual adapter PVID 55 and VID 888 (ent9) then added it to the existing
SEA as shown below:

Starting with HMC V8R8.1.0.1 there’s a new, enhanced HMC interface available. You are given the choice of using either the Classic or Enhanced interface when you login to the HMC.

If you select ‘Enhanced’ you may find that the traditional DLPAR menu (Dynamic partitioning) has seemingly disappeared! You may be expecting the “classic” DLPAR menu, as shown in the following image.

CLASSIC DLPAR

You will not find the ‘Dynamic partitioning’ option or interface. Instead, in the Enhanced interface, you must select ‘Manage’ (as shown in the following image).

ENHANCED DLPAR

You are presented with a very different DLPAR interface. However, you can perform normal DLPAR operations as you have in the past. In the example (shown below) we can immediately see that the RMC connection to the partition is active and the partition is running. Here we could change the processor settings for the partition. For example, I could change the partition from Uncapped to Capped and then simply select either OK and/or Apply to make this change dynamically.

Learn about the differences between the Classic and Enhanced graphical user interface (GUI) in the Hardware Management Console (HMC).

My colleague in Lab Services, Ben Swinney, recently configured the Virtual HMC on his Apple Macbook. He was kind enough to write up his experience, so that others could also run the vHMC on their Mac. Me included!